Bone Discovery May Show That Neanderthal Man Could Talk
The discovery of a 60,000-year-old, two-inch neck bone in a cave in Israel, reported in today’s issue of the British journal Nature, suggests that modern man’s brutish predecessor, the Neanderthal, may have had the physical capacity to speak.
The conclusion--drawn by a group of Israeli, French and American archeologists--has provoked sharp reactions from other scientists and has rekindled a long-simmering controversy over the origin and evolution of human language.
But Baruch Arensburg and his colleagues in Israel contend that the tiny U-shaped fossil, which was discovered in the Kebara Cave at Mt. Carmel, closely resembles its counterpart, known as the hyoid bone, in modern humans. What that means, they say, is that voice-production machinery has changed little over the past 60,000 years.
Speech Capability
“We conclude,” they wrote in the Nature article, “that the morphological basis for human speech capability appears to have been fully developed during the Middle Paleolithic”--the period known as the Stone Age, from about 2.5 million to 9,000 years ago.
The ability to talk--to make commands, to articulate arguments, to give voice to emotions--is surely one of the most complex and remarkable of human achievements. Speech has long been thought to be the characteristic that separates modern humans from their ape-like ancestors.
For some years now, many anatomists, anthropologists, linguists and others working in Europe and the United States have concluded that the physical elements necessary for complex spoken language--the voice box, the tongue and associated muscles--must have evolved to today’s level of sophistication about 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. Researchers have based their conclusions on massive reconstructions of the head and neck bones of early human and pre-human fossils and computerized models of the soft tissues that probably surrounded these bones.
Critics have wasted no time in voicing their skepticism about the new study.
“This guy is way off base,” said Dr. Edmund S. Crelin, a distinguished professor of anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine. “What he’s done is basically attach a whole theory of evolution to a little bone.”
“The problem,” said Dr. Jeffrey T. Laitman, associate professor of anatomy at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, “is that this is the first and only bone of its kind that we have found” in the fossilized remains of prehistoric man. “For all we know, all hyoid bones may look alike all the way back to the beginning of time.”
Mammals Have Bone
According to Philip Lieberman, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University, most mammals have a hyoid bone that looks much like the human equivalent and yet it is clear that most mammals cannot speak as humans do.
“If we were to accept the reasoning of these archeologists, we could prove that pigs talk. Which may explain the Old Testament injunction against eating pig. In a happier, earlier time in Israel perhaps pigs did talk,” Lieberman quipped.
The debate, the scientists agree, is not over whether Neanderthals or other predecessors of modern man could make sounds or even whether they could communicate by means of their voices--indeed most animals can and do. The issue is whether they were able to articulate the vast range of modern human sounds that make complex human speech possible.
“The first human vocal tracts appear in fossils 300,000 years ago,” Crelin said. “The evidence is very clear . . . in the shape of the skulls, the length of the mandibles (or lower jaws). Before that, they (the vocal tracts) look like those of an ape or a baby.”
One of the interesting aspects of the human vocal tract is that it changes over time. At birth, a human baby’s vocal tract is shaped and positioned much like that of a dog or a cat, which means it can make only a limited number of sounds and has the ability to breath and swallow at the same time. At about one year of age, the larynx descends and human speech as we know it begins to form.
But adult humans pay a big price for the ability to speak. Because they cannot breath and swallow at the same time, they can choke to death fairly easily and quickly.
The elaborate reconstructions and computer models of human head and neck and mouth structures provide “persuasive evidence” of a rather dramatic evolution in the structure of the vocal tract, Laitman said.
“Baruch and his colleagues haven’t proven anything; they’ve only made assertions,” Laitman added. “In science, you can’t just say it; you have to show it. This isn’t the 19th Century, which is the kind of science they are practicing.”
In a telephone interview from his office at Yale, Crelin was even less complimentary of Baruch. “This guy’s an idiot,” said Crelin, who acknowledged being particularly irritated by a less than flattering review that Baruch had written earlier of a book Crelin wrote in 1987 explaining the evolution of the human vocal tract. In the review in the “American Scientist,” Baruch called Crelin’s theories “unexplained,” his conclusions “bizarre” and described the book as having “anatomical errors.”
“He says he found anatomical mistakes in my book!” Crelin exclaimed. “My God, for 35 years I’ve been the expert on anatomy here.”
The ferocity with which these scientists were attacking each other this week is not uncommon in the field of vocal evolution, according to those who are in the middle of the dispute. One of the reasons seems to be that the controversy over human speech is part of a larger debate on whether Neanderthals were direct ancestors of modern humans, rather than an evolutionary dead-end.
Behind that controversy is an even larger debate over exactly where and how prehistoric ape-like mammals made their fateful transition to modern human beings.
On one side, there are those--and the numbers are growing--who hold that modern humans evolved in one place--probably Africa--and then migrated throughout the world. In this camp, racial differences are attributed to human evolutionary responses to regional conditions.
On the other side are those--among them Baruch and a number of prominent scientists--who believe that modern humans arose virtually simultaneously and independently in different places in Africa, Europe and Asia.
